South Africa: patriarchy, paper, and reclaiming feminism

It’s not an individualist but a collective feminism that we need, one that measures success not by how high a woman can climb, but by the condition in which most women remain, says Shereen Essof

On
the 4th of April 1981 hundreds of people from all over the Western
Cape in South Africa gathered in the hall of the St Francis Cultural Centre in
Langa to participate in the first Conference of the United
Women's Organisation (UWO). At that
meeting Dora
Tamana spoke with fire in her heart:

“You
who have no work,speak.

You who have no homes, speak.

You who have no schools, speak.

You
who have to run like chickens from the vultures, speak.

We
must share the problems so that we can solve them together.

We
must free ourselves.

Men
and women must share housework.

Men
and women must work together in the home and out in the world.

There
are no crèches and nursery schools for our children, no homes for the aged, or
people to care for the sick.

Women
must unite to fight for these rights.

We must go forward!....."

Has anything changed for women since that day when
Tamana spoke? Women know intimately how the last 30 years in South Africa’s
history have been stamped with two outstanding achievements: the birth of a
constitutional state and multiparty democracy, and the constitutional
commitment to eliminating racial and gendered discrimination.

The years post 1994 were filled with hope and
promise that things would be better.
For some women things did get better:
women participated in key positions of power; in parliament and
government, as voters, legislators, members of the judiciary, members and
leaders of political parties, civil society activists, political analysts,
media agents, public servants, public intellectuals and more generally as
citizens exercising their agency in the broad spectrum of their daily lives and
that of South African society. The
lives of many women living in South Africa improved with some becoming the rich
class.

But too many women continue to live in poverty,
too many black women are amongst the poorest of the poor. Too many are struggling without basic
services, are stretched by the impacts of HIV/AIDS and a failing health care
system that does not prioritise sexual and reproductive health needs. Women in
South Africa know about the betrayals and empty
achievements that came with a New
South Africa.

But
what we are facing today is both the failure of, and reaction to, the attempt
to end patriarchy via paper. Commitments to ending gender inequality through
enshrining clauses in constitutions, via parliamentary legislation, state
policy and national gender machineries is not unique to South Africa. But
policy reform is not an end in itself and has led to the consolidation of political power and capital
that in no way has helped to dismantle patriarchy. Feminism remains a “dirty” word, often interpolated as
anti-nationalist and pro-imperialist, by those who do not like to see women act
autonomously and claim equality.

In reclaiming feminism we
need concepts and thinking tools that reflect our reality and serve our
purpose. The feminism we need is anti-essentialist. It sees gender as lived in
many different ways. So it makes sense to talk about masculinities and
femininities in the plural. It’s not an individualist but a collective
feminism, measuring success not by how high a woman can climb, but by the
condition in which most women remain.

The feminism we need goes
beyond simply remarking on the difference between women’s and men’s life
experiences. A feminism of this kind sees, and tries to understand and
challenge this patriarchal gender order. That’s what it’s for. But we want to
take one step more now, and carry this feminism into an engagement with the
oppressive ideologies of nationalism and militarism that flow from
patriarchy.

These 'brother ideologies'
have similar consequences for women and men, for gender relations. Patriarchy,
nationalism and militarism reinforce each other. Nationalism's in love with patriarchy because patriarchy offers
it women who'll breed true little patriots. Militarism's in love with
patriarchy because its women offer up their sons to be soldiers. Patriarchy's
in love with nationalism and militarism because they produce unambiguously
masculine men and submissive women.

In South Africa today new
forms of patriarchy masked as a conservative traditionalism and militarism are
on the increase. Some examples can be
found in the uptake by popular culture of things like the song ‘Umshini Wami /
we baba / awuleth' Umshini Wami’ (my machine gun / oh father / please bring me my machine gun) a song historically associated with the
liberation struggle but now adopted in an unreconnstructed way as the signature
tune of President Jacob Zuma. It is not
only militaristic, but carries heteronormative sexual inuendo, and it entangles
us in a seamless masculinity with little place for a range of
gendered identities in the current dispensation. Neoliberal capitalist agendas have
intersected with patriarchy, nationalism and militarism in ways that have
reasserted and redefined the roles of men and women, as well as who constitutes
a citizen in this country. The hate crimes that we are witnessing: xenophobic attacks
against ‘immigrants’, corrective rape of lesbians, the stripping of women who
are transgressing gendered norms - all examples of the violence of transgression
of this triage and the identities that it constructs and condones. We have to
ask what does this mean for women and society at large?

In
this period too our political language of struggle as women has been usurped by
the system and depoliticised. Thabo
Mbeki, more than any other president, male or female, took the project of
liberal feminism further than anyone else.
The Mbeki project was driven by
the desire to give women equal representation within the confines of the
existing power structures. It gave
women recourse to the law, to equal representation through the language of
quotas and gender parity and it opened up the project of building South Africa
as a competitive capitalist democracy to the participation of women.

What
is the problem here? Is it one of
insufficient commitment to and implementation of the project of gender
equality? Or is it a problem that stems
from the limitations of the project itself?
Today in 2012, we have the laboratory result of what you get if you
fight patriarchy within these limitations. Women’s land
and housing rights are still limited and insecure. Too many women continue to live in poverty.
One in every three women in South Africa is in an abusive relationship, a woman is killed
by her partner every six days, and there is a rape every 35 seconds.

For
women struggling for the emancipation of women, there are many platforms from
which to fight this fight. In South Africa there is a long history of feminist
activists located within movements
whose primary interest is not feminist, like working class movements, unions
and community organisations. A lot of
time has been spent thinking about how to make these formations more feminist,
how to “mainstream” a women’s agenda.

But
these attempts have diluted the feminist spirit and agenda because the proverbial
‘starting point’ must always be negotiated or fought for. There is always need
to justify the focus on the liberation of women as a means to some other end,
whether it’s national liberation, socialism or working class emancipation
despite it being politically correct and sometimes strategic for leftist
organizations to have women on board.
In this context women are weighed down by having to right the wrongs
being done to us by the organisational forms we choose to work within,
as well as by the system within which we live.

It’s
the same old story, women work in supporting and building the struggles and
organizations, but the campaigns are designed in ways that do not accommodate women’s agendas. When women
challenge male leadership in our moments of radicalism around our own agendas
we find that the spaces become hostile, and our male comrades - and other women
- become agents that police our radicalism too.

In
an environment of deepening polarisation, alienation and misogyny, when the
world’s socio-economic and political paradigms are failing us, it is important
that as feminist activists we re-evaluate our strategy in order to be clear
about which platforms allow us to engage in activism that contributes to
building a free world for all people by dismantling patriarchy and its brother
ideologies..

There
are critical questions for women’s organising and how we engage in mixed gender
spaces and struggles. How do we
organise for our own sense of power and agency? How do we ensure our safety and
well being? How do we organise for the backlash that will come? Currently, our
needs are not being addressed, and spaces and opportunities to further radicalise
struggle are being lost. Are we
satisfied doing the same things in the same way? Are our actions taking us closer to where we want to be, if our
ultimate goal is the emancipation of all women? We've come a long way and that has to be acknowledged and
celebrated. But we have not
arrived.

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